Picture from People

I know that when it comes to seasonal expectation, the annual arrival of my kazoo renditions of Christmas favourites isn't exactly up there with Morecambe and Wise, Only Fools, or the big film on Christmas Day afternoon. Yet I am determined to push on with this and release something every year whether you need it or not. Last year's album is still available to download, and a follow up will be released soon. To further compound the misery, I am already planning the third album for release in 2017 and this year I have decided to offer an exclusive treat on top. 

It has taken a while to get this right, but I finally have my cover version of 'Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy' by David Bowie and Bing Crosby. I had thought about recording a David Bowie covers album in time for the anniversary of his death in January but I decided against it for reasons of timing and the fact that people might see it as disrespectful. However, I have paid tribute to Bowie by painstakingly recording two tracks separately and weaving them together to make a kazoo duet with myself. 

The finished result doesn't sound as bad as you would imagine, although how it sounds to your ears depends entirely on your opinion of the kazoo as a musical instrument. Last year's album wasn't exactly a platinum seller, in fact I don't think it sold enough copies to go cardboard. This year's effort hasn't been released yet, and 'Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy' is a way to hopefully boost the funds for making filmed projects by offering it as an exclusive. It is only available by email to people who make a donation of £1 or more using the PayPal button above. The song makes an ideal Christmas present for the kazoo lover in your life. 

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 This week's edition of The Sunday Alternative is here. 

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A seaside town in winter, as I have mentioned before, is a beautifully bleak and grim place with a hint of sadness hanging over it. With the boarded up shops and locked amusement parks it is as if the place goes on hold until the sun comes out again, it's as if someone throws a switch and freezes the place in suspended animation. The shops that do open are purely functional apart from a smattering of resilient merchants who brave the cold on the off-chance that someone might want to buy a stick of rock and a kiss-me-quick hat. I bought a few old fashioned rude postcards and some sticks of rock to go with my souvenirs - I keep everything; travel tickets, food receipts, a stone and a piece of seaweed from the beach and a local newspaper. 

The piers are closed, and the I wonder what the people on the tram are using it for at this time of the year. Of course during the summer it is handy for getting from one end of the promenade to another but this doesn't look like a commuter route but I suppose it is. I would like to organise an educational visit for the staff and management of the Nottingham tram company so they can see how a tram system is operated. Along the front, a few hotels are optimistically declaring that they have vacancies and in most cases have their Christmas decorations up, presumably as an enticement. What strikes me the most about Blackpool though (and this isn't meant in a derogatory way as everyone we encountered was friendly and welcoming) is that it knows exactly what it is and doesn't try to pretend otherwise. This is a working class resort that doesn't even know where the airs and graces are kept, never mind putting them on. Any town that has a Poundland, a B&M and a Sports Direct on the seafront is not a posh place to visit. A sad fact is that there's a lot of homelessness and poverty here, much like any other town or city I realise, and I'm hopeful that Blackpool has some way of trying to help, if only because it is fucking freezing here. 

Walking around the town last night was a strange experience as it never seems to take long to walk into an area that looks dangerous, especially as we are strangers. It isn't intimidating as such but you do try and keep looking out for people lurking around. Having said that I do this in Nottingham or anywhere really. 

What really impressed me though, was Blackpool's pride in its comedy legacy. I've already mentioned the pub The Albert and the Lion, which aside from the poem also displays old music hall and variety posters. Blackpool was once known as an entertainment mecca and although now a little shabby round the edges displays an affection for its heritage. There's the statue of Morecambe and Wise, the Comedy Carpet, and a pub that I sadly can't remember the name of with photographs of many of the famous people born in the town and a big display dedicated to Charlie Cairoli. Obviously Cairoli wasn't born in Blackpool (he was born in Milan) but made the place his home. After being presented with a watch by Adolf Hitler in 1939 he was performing in Blackpool in September of the same year when war war broke out. In protest, Cairoli walked to the end of the North Pier and threw the watch into the sea before deciding to stay. 

And people think clowns are bad.

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 This week's edition of The Sunday Alternative is here. 

Thank you in advance for donating using the PayPal button at the top of this page. It all goes towards creating podcasts, sketches, documentaries, films and more, all of which I will make available for free in return for your generosity.

I was not impressed with my breakfast this morning but it was Mandi's choice of venue today as she doesn't like to eat a fry up and always like to go for a healthier and less greasy option. What passed as a full English in this cafe left a lot to be desired as they seemed to be trying too hard, especially as it was on a square plate, it could have been worse I suppose given that some places use chopping boards or paving stones. The sad thing is that it is a nice place with friendly staff and from what I could see from the other meals being brought out I think I just got unlucky, if you're ever in Blackpool you could do worse than Number 5. 

We had tickets to an exhibition called Illuminasia at the Winter Gardens. Not knowing what to expect I imagined it would be similar to my past experiences with art galleries and the like, that I would pretend to be interested for as long as my patience ran out before leaving Mandi to it and whizzing round looking at everything quickly and going out for a cigarette. However this was unlike anything I have ever seen before, mainly because I had never seen large things made out of Chinese lanterns before, just go and see it if you can. 

I had been looking forward to finding the new statue of Morecambe and Wise that has been erected in Blackpool, and had packed my kazoo in the hope of making a video of me serenading them with a blast of 'Bring Me Sunshine' as a follow up to last year's 'Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside' in a Brighton bandstand. It was only after I looked it up in the hotel room that I realised that the statue is inside the Winter Gardens and for some reason I felt very shy of performing as a lot of people were there to see Eric and Ernie and take photographs. The sad thing is in retrospect is that I bet they would have loved it, (the people in the building I mean - I wasn't suggesting that M&W might be watching from Heaven because I don't believe in that sort of thing), you don't regret the things you do, you regret the things you don't do. 

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 This week's edition of The Sunday Alternative is here. 

Thank you in advance for donating using the PayPal button at the top of this page. It all goes towards creating podcasts, sketches, documentaries, films and more, all of which I will make available for free in return for your generosity.

Picture from BBC

Thanks to a friend of Mandi's we have a pile of VHS tapes of Only Fools and Horses in the house which I have been keen to get stuck into now that we have finished Jeeves and Wooster. The collection of tapes is fairly random and incomplete but I have worked out some kind of chronological order in which we should watch them. I remain a big fan of the series although I did get a little bored with seeing the same episodes on a loop on GOLD. Now we only have Freeview and as any fellow Freeview viewer will know, your viewing is a little dodgy because the picture tends to pixilate as soon as you get to the punchline to a joke or a vital plot point in Eastenders. The other delight with Freeview is that the range of channels you have changes on a regular basis and if you fancy something different like Dave then you have to retune and run the risk of losing BBC1 or something. Therefore the GOLD channels are no longer something I bother with and I am now ready to watch Only Fools with renewed interest. 

Mandi isn't keen on the character of Granddad, played by Lennard Pearce until his death in 1984 but we decided to watch them as I enjoyed his and Buster Merryfield's Uncle Albert for different reasons. The early episodes haven't lost any of their magic and have had us laughing thanks to the combination of acting and writing from all involved. It's weird to think that the first series was a flop and only gained a following due to a strike necessitating a repeat run to fill a gap in the schedules. As funny as the scripts still are we have the original VHS releases that haven't had the same politically correct edits made that happen prior to television broadcast and although bad language was never an issue it is a bit of a shock to hear words like 'paki' and 'chinky' being casually tossed out - the most notorious being during the episode The Russians Are Coming - but it is not our place to criticise the standards of the past based on today's values. Other elements that date it slightly are the strange little things; smoking in pubs, using the pub payphone, and odd little pop culture references that would have been topical at the time. 

It's interesting (to me at least) that the first three series (possibly others but as I said I don't have a complete collection) end with a Christmas themed episode, later of course the Christmas special was a stand alone feature length episode that didn't mention Christmas. This might have been based on Eric Morecambe's insistence that the Morecambe and Wise special had no Christmassy element to ensure a repeat showing during the summer bringing with it a repeat fee. In later years they did away with the series altogether and just brought out a long episode for broadcast on Christmas Day, as did Morecambe and Wise and one day perhaps Doctor Who will follow suit. I don't know if cassette tape was expensive to produce compared to DVD but it was quite rare for a complete series to be released on tape, most of these episodes come packaged as three or four chronological episodes or a tape containing just a Christmas special. One of the tapes is a 'best of' compilation which is a bit messy as it contains both Granddad and Uncle Albert episodes, and one when I assume Lennard Pearce was on his last legs as he doesn't feature at all. 

We still have a way to go with this collection so I might come back to the subject later on when I have nothing better to write about.

The Sunday Alternative #56 is available from here.

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September housekeeping

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Communication Breakdown

Gary Morecambe seems to have carved out quite a career for himself writing books about his late father. Luckily for him, his late father happens to be Eric Morecambe. I have read a lot of books about Morecambe and Wise as a double act, and books about the individual Eric and Ernie so I know quite a lot about how they came together as kids and survived tough years to become the institution we know and love today.

Any true fan will know that the first television series was not a hit, but they persisted. We also know that they shared a genuine friendship, not requisite for a comedy double act (Abbott and Costello hated each other for example). In fact, from the books I have read, I am sure I could write a book of my own about Eric and Ern.

But Gary Morecambe has unearthed a letter from Wise to Morecambe while rummaging through his dad’s archives. Just when I thought that every letter, diary and notepad had been aired in public, along comes something that skews everything we already knew.

Written around 1950, before they had their own television show, Ernie Wise wrote a letter to Eric Morecambe:

Dear Eric

Thanks for your letter. Well Eric I want to get straight to the point. I want us to break up the act. I’m afraid it won’t work. I have such a terrific amount of animosity to put up with at home. I feel it would be better if we parted. I know this will be quite a shock to you but I had to come to some decision, I can’t go on the way things are.

I am not satisfied with my work, I have lost a lot of my zip and it will take time to regain it. I can’t keep you waiting around for me, I don’t know definitely when I will be out. I feel it’s a great pity after we planned so much, but my mind’s made up. I have no idea what to do in the future, all I know is that I want us to remain friends.

Hoping to hear from you

Your best pal

Ernie

Many editorials have gone down the road of saying we would have been deprived of such a comic legacy, but I am not sure. Eric Morecambe did most of the writing, but professional scriptwriters did the most work. He was a great ad-libber and a gifted technician of a joke. He would have been a comedian still with or without Ernie.

Ernie regretted not giving America a serious go, to capitalise on their appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. Realising that it would mean a start from the bottom rung of the ladder again, Eric was not keen.

Wise was a song and dance man by trade before adding the jokes to his act; in fact, if you look at the earliest television appearances by the pair, Ernie is the gagman. His career might have gone in a different direction once he regained his ‘zip’, possibly down the Tommy Steele route of musical theatre and pantomime.

Life is full of ‘what ifs’. If there were no Morecambe and Wise, how would comedy look today? Rowan Atkinson was a school friend of Gary Morecambe and went round for dinner one night and Eric spent the whole time advising him on comedy technique. Without advice from one of the country’s top comedians, would he have bothered?

Eric Morcambe visibly influences Vic Reeves. Although Vic Reeves Big Night Out was closer in style to Spike Milligan’s Q series, his on stage manner owed a debt to Morecambe.

This throws a hole in the story I thought I knew about the pair from the struggle of the early days and the ambition to get to the top. No mention was ever made before about this ‘terrific amount of animosity’ Ernie was getting from home. He didn’t even write about it in his autobiography Still On My Way To Hollywood or in any of the interviews he gave following Morecambe’s death in 1984.

There is a lot to be said for hoarding, I really hope the reply letter is found. Gary Morecambe knew this letter existed but has only just seen it for himself. “My father’s response, he told me, was to write back basically saying he’d never heard such rubbish in his life and that Ernie should have a few days rest to get over it and then they should get back to work- which essentially is what happened”

What I find the most fascinating about this whole episode though, is not a new bit of comedy history. It is the fact that they communicated such discussion by letter. I am not going to go on again about the loss of our postal service, but does anyone agree that the written word is disappearing?

In years to come such discoveries will simply not happen. Someone goes through a box in a cellar or attic and finds handwritten words by Shakespeare, or a rough draft of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' scrawled on a cigarette packet, or letters to and from people in the public domain and it is big news. However, in the future no ability to build such an archive will be available. Most writers (me included) type straight onto computer now. Although I do sometimes revert to longhand. If I ever do become a notable author, my memory stick will not be useful to anyone in a hundred years because technology will have moved. I still have old works from my earliest journalism days on a three and a half inch floppy disk, and if I can’t access it who will?

The same goes for communication. I very much doubt Mitchell and Webb write letters to each other, or that Frankie Boyle got out his Basildon Bond to write ‘Dear Dara, I’m leaving Mock The Week…’

I cannot see the same excitement and column inches being devoted to someone’s emails being found years after their deaths.

Unless they do what I have done and included all my passwords in my will!